They Are Rare

Ah, the four horsemen of software development reality. On one side, you've got non-engineers throwing random examples at you like confetti at a parade. Meanwhile, engineers are busy creating elegant abstract models with "general rules" that work beautifully... in theory. Then comes implementation - that beautiful moment when your elegant solution crashes into the wall of "weird corner cases" and "unintended consequences." Don't forget the obligatory hack comment that somehow keeps the whole thing from imploding. And finally, the solution that SHOULD have been implemented - simple, straightforward, and completely ignored in favor of whatever Frankenstein's monster we actually shipped. With a "red herring" thrown in just to make sure we wasted time chasing something irrelevant. This isn't a meme. It's a documentary.

Ah, the infinite recursion of corporate time tracking. You're spending so much time documenting your hours in Jira that you need to document the time spent documenting time... and then document that time too. It's the bureaucratic equivalent of a stack overflow, except your sanity crashes first. Eight years into my career and I've started estimating "Jira maintenance" as its own task. 2 hours per sprint just to update tickets that tell management what I'm doing instead of, you know, actually doing it. The real joke? Somewhere there's a product manager using this data to optimize workflows. Irony, thy name is enterprise software.

The perfect recipe for a startup: take one developer who writes code like they're blindfolded typing with oven mitts, add a marketer whose entire strategy is "make the logo bigger," and voilà! You've got yourself a company valued at $10M pre-revenue. It's the blind leading the blind into a Series A funding round. The handshake represents that magical moment when two people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing decide they should definitely do it together—and somehow convince venture capitalists to throw money at them. The real miracle is that this partnership occasionally creates unicorns. The tech industry: where incompetence meets incompetence and somehow equals disruption.

Ah, the classic developer-manager communication gap! The first scroll says "Yes" because technically the task is done. But unfold that scroll and suddenly there's a novel-length explanation about how yesterday's "finished" feature spawned a fresh hell of bugs that now need fixing. This is why standup meetings that should take 15 minutes somehow stretch to an hour. The manager just wanted a simple yes/no, but developers live in a world where nothing is ever truly "done" - there's always another bug lurking in the shadows, waiting to ruin your weekend plans.

Turns out the bar for project management is so low you could trip over it while looking for your missing semicolon. Just mindlessly repeat "How's the project going?" every few days and congratulations—you've mastered 90% of the job description. The other 10% is creating Gantt charts nobody will ever look at and scheduling meetings that could've been Slack messages. Meanwhile, developers are over here solving actual problems while the parrot—I mean PM—gets all the credit for "driving the initiative forward." But hey, at least the parrot looks good in that graduation cap.

Construction workers building a completely misaligned brick wall is basically the software development lifecycle in one image. "Just keep coding. We can always fix it later" is the mantra that turns 2-week sprints into 6-month refactoring nightmares. The technical debt pictured here would make even the most optimistic project manager cry. But hey, at least it compiles.